[Women have always been crucial in The Lord of the Rings. Now
they’re the main characters.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

IN THE RINGS OF POWER, IT’S NOT HORRIFYING TO BE A WOMAN  
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Rebecca Jennings
September 2, 2022
Vox
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_ Women have always been crucial in The Lord of the Rings. Now
they’re the main characters. _

Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) takes center stage in Amazon’s new
prequel series. , Amazon

 

The first question I got after seeing the first two episodes of
Amazon’s new _Lord of the Rings _prequel series _The Rings of
Power _was, “Is it like _Game of Thrones_?” It’s a fair
question; in the age of streaming services, high fantasy has been
practically synonymous with the epic HBO franchise, which now has its
own prequel, _House of the Dragon_
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But from my female friends who asked it, I knew exactly what they
meant: “Is this version of Middle Earth going to be one where women
are routinely assaulted, degraded, and objectified?”

_The Lord of the Rings, _while never as gratuitously graphic
as _GoT,_ has always had a complicated relationship to its women. In
a 1969 essay for the Columbia University Press, feminist scholar
Catharine Stimpson published
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scathing critique of the women of J.R.R. Tolkien’s _The Lord of the
Rings_. “The most hackneyed of stereotypes,” she described them.
“They are either beautiful and distant, simply distant, or simply
simple.”

Yet for her sake, I hope that Stimpson watched Peter Jackson’s
adaptations_,_ which, despite centering mainly on the male characters
just as the source material does, greatly expand the roles of Middle
Earth’s most famous women. This was thanks in large part to Fran
Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the two screenwriters who, alongside
Jackson, wrote the scripts for all three films. Beyond fleshing out
the duties of Galadriel, Arwen, and Eowyn, Walsh and Boyens were also
responsible
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the trilogy’s most poignant moments, adding emotional depth to
characters that in the text appear flat or one-note.

All of this is to say that despite _The Lord of the Rings_ books’
reputation as a coming-of-age series for boys, when they were released
in the first few years of the millennium, the films found an enormous
fan base among young women. “It is technically an epic fantasy
adventure, but I don’t think it hews to the same kind of ideas of
masculinity and power that a lot of these stories traditionally do,”
the writer Karen Han told the New York Times for a story
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millennial female fans. In fact, it is the stereotypically male-coded
vices of greed and power that are the overarching foes of Tolkien’s
works, while the humble Hobbits and unspoiled countrysides and forests
of Middle Earth are the heroes.

The hobbit-like Harfoots, including Nori Brandyfoot (Markella
Kavenagh), center.

 Amazon

For women like me who grew up loving _LOTR_
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the news that Amazon was producing a prequel was both exciting and
slightly worrisome. Had _Game of Thrones_ cast such a shadow over
the entertainment world that a high fantasy series without sex and
gore was considered unprofitable? (For context about what happens to
the women of _GoT_, in the first two episodes of _House of the
Dragon,_ there’s a brutally graphic childbirth scene in which both
mother and infant die
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and in the second, a grown man almost marries a 12-year-old girl
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Co-showrunner Patrick McKay has previously said publicly
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Rings of Power_ will eschew graphic violence and sex scenes and will
be appropriate “for kids who are 11, 12, and 13,” though the
concerns were widespread enough that more than 50,000 fans signed
a Change.org petition
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keep nudity out of the series. Anonymous sources told the fan
blog The One Ring that
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there will be nudity in the series, it would be “sparse and not
sexualized.”

To answer the question: _The Rings of Power_ is not like _Game of
Thrones,_ at least not in that way. In short, it explores Middle
Earth’s Second Age, which takes place thousands of years before the
events of _The Hobbit _and _The Lord of the Rings _and is not
based on any of Tolkien’s novels, but rather the information gleaned
in their appendices. We know broadly what happens during the Second
Age
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much of its main plot is described in the opening flashback of _The
Fellowship of the Ring: T_he evil lord Sauron distributes the rings of
power to humans, elves, and dwarves, keeping the secret all-powerful
One Ring for himself, which Isildur eventually takes by cutting off
Sauron’s finger in battle.

But because Tolkien never dedicated a book to the Second Age,
showrunners McKay and J.D. Payne have taken creative liberties with
the characters who fill out the story. Happily, many of the most
important ones are women: Amazon’s series centers on a younger
Galadriel, played by Morfydd Clark (Cate Blanchett in the films), a
warrior elven princess intent on avenging her brother’s death by
Sauron. Though we see zero dwarf women in _LOTR_, _The Rings of
Power _introduces Disa (Sophia Nomvete), the wife of dwarf prince
Durin IV, who seems to wield meaningful power in Khazad-dûm. Among
the hobbit-like Harfoots, we see the spunky young Nori Brandyfoot
(Markella Kavenagh), and in the world of men, there’s the healer and
single mother Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), who strikes up a romance with
a warrior elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova). None of these characters
aside from Galadriel were created by Tolkien himself, which again,
could be exciting, but could just as easily end up falling into the
stereotypical tropes of high fantasy women written by men. The truth
is we simply haven’t seen enough of these characters yet to say for
sure (it does, however, pass the Bechdel test
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Though _The_ _Rings of Power, _at least in its first few episodes,
doesn’t seem to rejoice in the suffering of its characters the
way _Game of Thrones_ tends to, I remain skeptical about the other
ways in which it mirrors the HBO series — namely, in its story
structure. Like many shows in the age of prestige TV, _The_ _Rings
of Power_ regularly leaves its audience with mysterious cliffhangers
as we jump from scene to scene. It is action-packed, and it is
beautiful to look at, but rather than hinging on one strong storyline,
we’re strung along on several that remain frustratingly unclear. And
just as I often felt nervous while watching _Game of
Thrones_ whether it had a coherent endpoint in mind as it weaved and
bobbed through Westeros, I worry that _The Rings of Power_ will be
stuffed with too many invented subplots and side characters that
ultimately don’t have anything to do with the story besides adding
more run time. (The entire series will consist of 50 hours of
television
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five seasons, quadruple the length of all three
extended _LOTR_ extended editions.)

Despite the complexity in its language, its geography, and its
plot, _LOTR_ is, at its core, a quite simple story, one in which
there is good and there is evil. We don’t get a lot of these kinds
of stories anymore: As Polygon’s Susana Polo has written of the two
decades
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the film’s premiere, “Blockbuster film didn’t embrace the
sincerity of the _Lord of the Rings_ movies — the way they
elevated deep and pure emotions to the level of an adult epic — in
the same manner.” Instead, we’ve grown accustomed to cynical,
self-deprecating heroes and antiheroes from our big-budget franchises.
That hasn’t always been a bad thing; action and fantasy films
embracing the nuances of morality and subverting the logic of cinema
have led to some of the 21st century’s best filmmaking.
But _LOTR _doesn’t aim to toy with its audiences’ expectations;
it doesn’t have to. Its themes are timeless.

My hope for the rest of the series is that it resists the urge to
inject this sort of postmodernism into Middle Earth and remains
relatively escapist, not just so that viewers don’t have to think
about current events while watching it, but so the women in the
audience who view _LOTR_ as comfort consumption can get a reprieve
from seeing our oppression reflected back to us. I don’t need Jeff
Bezos’s billion-dollar vanity project to show me why being a female
elf sucks.

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* rings of power
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* lord of the rings
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* women in media
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